It's (probably) a little known fact that we share the same rural location (all be it separated by the village of Tiptree) as a direct competitor in our space - Hot Lizard (now of the JobServe / Aspire Media Group stable).

Nothing particularly blog worthy about that - although I did have a little smile to myself when little ole us won Yell's business off them. So imagine my surprise when a good friend of mine reported the following conversation:

"Just had an interesting phone call from Hot Lizard. Who, it transpires, apparently designed and built the Yell.com careers website.  .... Thought I might mention this to you as, if I' not mistaken, TMP designed their site, and you built the ATS. .... According to the sales moron who just called me, they do the lot still. Because I asked him."

My friend was of course right - TMP did indeed design the site (as they did the previous iteration of it, not HotLizard even then) and now we host it on our CMS and, of course, provide the underpinning ATS. And we have done so since HotLizard switched off their solution back at the start of July.

The conversation was made all the more farcical by the fact that this friend of mine works at a Recruitment Communications / Advertising agency that has not so long back relaunched their own site and over the years produced some very high profile and often critically acclaimed employer recruitment sites for their clients - so imagine his mirth when the lies were accompanied by a request to speak to the person who "looks after your recruitment" as apparently they could help them design and build their new recruitment website. Classic Muppetry.

I know that for many organisations New Business is about kissing as many frogs or chucking enough muck at a wall - and best of luck to this individual and the business he's "promoting" off the back of ignorance and lies, but I really hope any bites he gets follows up by connecting to one of Yell's resourcing team to find out the truth about their experience of the HotLizard solution and service.

Ah well - at least I know to look a bit further than the other side of Tiptree if I ever want to recruit a New Business Sales person type. :-]